


Arts and Crafts with Laura Hale

by pprfaith



Series: Naughty Hookers (Swathed in Wool) [10]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, Character Study, Crafts, Did I Mention The Crafts, F/F, F/M, Found Family, Future Fic, Gowing Up, Grief, Happy Ending, Hobbies, How Do I Tag, Humor, M/M, Mourning, Moving On, Multi, No Beta We Die Screaming, Parent-Child Relationship, Sibling Relationship, So many Crafts, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 03:01:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20108077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Laura Hale's lifelong quest to find the Perfect Craft Hobby.Or: it has occured to me that it might be time to let the children have their say.





	Arts and Crafts with Laura Hale

**Author's Note:**

> The summary pretty much says it all and I figured Laura is a good place to start. She has shit to say. 
> 
> It gets a little sad in there, somewhere, but I hope you know me well enough by now to know I won't leave you hanging. Please tell me how you like it, and let me know what else you'd like to see. I need something to ease me back into writing, so prompts are super welcome.

+

One of Laura’s earliest memories is of her and her mom, already pregnant with Derek, sitting on the back porch of their house in Beacon Hills, drawing. 

Laura thinks she got it into her head to draw every bird in their big yard, maybe. But that might just be something she added to the memory later. It might have been something Mom and Dad told her, too. 

She’s not sure. 

(Laura is ten when her parents burn in that same house. She knows of the fragility of human memory.)

She sits next to her mom, because her belly was too big for Laura to fit in her lap anymore, and together, they spend hours picking the perfect colors for birds they see only for moments.

“I’m going to be an artist,” Laura declares that day, four years old, and her mom laughs. 

“You’ll be anything you want. Don’t lock yourself in now, baby.”

Laura has no idea what that means, not for a long time, but she nods very seriously and goes back to drawing a pink sparrow. Maybe orange for the wings. It’ll look like a sunset. 

+

She sticks to drawing for a while, until she discovers pasta craft and then she plasters the fridge with painted and glued spaghetti, fussili, penne. She makes Derek a macaroni necklace and pouts for hours when he’s not allowed to wear it because, “He’ll try to eat it, baby, and the colors are bad for him. But he’ll love it when he’s older, I’m sure.”

Yeah. That kind of takes the fun out of pasta. 

Laura vengefully crunches the rest of her supplies until her teeth ache and decides she wants to learn karate next. 

+

She gets three lessons before she uses her newfound skills to beat up a poophead on the playground.

No more karate.

+

She starts school, then, and Derek is finally big enough to do more than sit and fart and for a while, she splits her time between learning how to read and write and running after her tiny idiot of a brother and keeping him from, like, drowning in the pond. 

“You know, Lulu, it’s been forever since I got a new painting from you to hang up in my office,” her dad mentions, at one point. 

Second grade? Maybe. Earlier, possible. 

(For a while, after the fire, Laura spends her nights staring at the unfamiliar ceiling over her unfamiliar bed in her unfamiliar room, trying to classify, sort and identify every single memory she has of her parents, for fear of losing those, too.)

She snorts, turns to give him some hefty side-eye and says, “I’m too busy for hobbies, Dad, I have school now.”

It takes her years to understand why that sends dad into a fit of laughter that has him rolling on the floor. 

+

And that’s pretty much it, for Laura Hale’s craft hobbies, Before. 

Capital B, always.

Before. 

She plays soccer and tries judo (“It’s a lot less hitting than Karate, maybe it’ll work out, Tal.”), then lacrosse, then softball, then soccer again, then ballet and then her mom puts down her foot.

“No. I’m calling a new-hobby-embargo for the next six months. We’ve spent more money on your experimenting in the past year than we have on Derek his entire life. For the next six months, you are going to carefully research and plan what you want to do, and then we’ll try again. Until then, if you want to play, there’s seven different kinds of equipment in the basement and a whole yard out there for you to use it in.”

Laura has to look up embargo, then cries at the unfairness of it all for two entire days, then decides to be an astronaut and you can’t practice for that anyway.

And then there is the zoo and fire and death and the hospital and so much crying. 

She promises, more than once, to never, ever try another sport, to always pick up her room, to do her homework and help with weeding and be a good girl, she’ll be such a good girl, just, please mommy, please wake up. 

Mom dies without ever lifting the embargo. Laura is left with that word and the sour feeling that she’ll never want to try anything new, ever again.

What’s the point of crafts, or sports, or anything, when mom’s not there to cheer her on and dad’s not there to proudly display her works in his office?

What point is there, when they’re dead?

+

A few months After, Uncle Peter asks, “Do you want to try joining a club? You used to do judo, right?”

Laura snorts, angrily. Because judo was two years ago, but he doesn’t know that, because he’s the Birthday-and-Christmas kind of uncle, and he always sent gifts, but he never really spent much time with them Before, and he just doesn’t know. 

Mom did. Dad did. But Uncle Peter doesn’t, because he wasn’t there and now he’s all they have and what is the point of him, when he doesn’t even know, can’t even change the baby and can’t make breakfast right and doesn’t kiss her goodnight and _she wants her parents back!_

She tells him that, shouts, louder, louder, and she’s crying, hiccupping with the force of it and she’s so angry, because it’s unfair, because why can’t he be dead, why can’t she have her mom, she wants her mom and she _hates him_! 

She runs. He lets her go. 

And that’s stupid, too, because mom and dad would never have let her get away with this, would never have let her shout and scream and use bad words and slam doors. They would have come after her and put her in time-out and then very sternly told her what she did wrong before hugging her and telling her to let it all out and Uncle Peter can’t even do that right. 

She cries herself to sleep, for a while. 

Around midnight, a headache and a nightmare wake her. Uncle Peter hasn’t come to check up on her. She sneaks out of her room to get herself a glass of water from the stupid big kitchen in the stupid big house that isn’t home, only to stop dead on the stairs. 

Uncle Peter’s in the living room, lying on the sofa, with a glass in hand. It’s alcohol, Laura knows, because she sniffed his bottles once. Mom and dad never drank around the kids. 

Uncle Peter does it almost every night. 

She’s almost decided to make do with her toothbrush cup and tab water, when she hears him talking. He’s just staring at the ceiling and talking. “Fuck, Tal, I’m shit at this. How the fuck did you do it? I’m just doing everything wrong and fucking up your poor kids and I don’t know,” he makes a sound that’s halfway between a sob and a sigh, “– I fucking miss you.”

Then he sighs again, long and sad and rubs a hand over his face and falls asleep right there, with the glass still in his hand, resting on his stomach. 

Suddenly, Laura isn’t thirsty anymore. 

+

The next morning, she gets the baby changed when she starts crying and passes Derek a cereal bar when he looks hungry and manages to let Uncle Peter sleep a little longer than usual. 

He comes stumbling in at seven, bleary-eyed and red-faced and yesterday, Laura thought it was because he was drunk, because alcohol is bad and Uncle Peter has some every night.

Now she knows better. 

She brandishes her little sister. “Can you put her in her chair? I can’t reach.”

Uncle Peter blinks, owlishly, then takes Cora and plops her in her high chair. Laura nods. And then, because she feels terrible, because she forgot that Uncle Peter was mom’s brother, because she thinks that losing Derek would hurt just as much as losing mom and dad, she hugs him, briefly, around the waist. 

She doesn’t say sorry, because she doesn’t know how, but from the way he hesitates and then hugs her back (badly), she thinks he gets it. 

He doesn’t ask her about hobbies again for a good, long while. 

+

Derek wants to crochet. 

He’s been staring at the little cluster of girls a year below Laura for weeks at recess and she knows what her dork of a little brother looks like when he wants something and he wants that _badly_. At first she thinks he has a crush on one of the girls, but then she watches him watch them for a few days and it’s their hands he looks at, and their little bags full of sparkly yarn and the way their fingers dance over the needles. 

Yeah. 

Derek wants to crochet. 

(It takes Laura two whole days to figure out that that’s what it is, because how is she supposed to know that there are _multiple_ things you can do with yarn and bits of metal?)

She elbows him one night during _Spongebob_. “You could just ask those girls to let you try.”

He turtles into his stupid hoodie and makes a little dying-whale noise, which means, very clearly, no, and also, Laura is an idiot. 

She elbows him again on principle. 

“Do you want me to talk to them?”

Louder dying whale noise. 

“Dork.”

She gets to her feet, marches into Uncle Peter’s study and climbs into the visitor chair across the desk. She doesn’t know why he has a visitor chair in his study at home because that seems dumb, but it’s comfortable, so. 

She waits until he looks at her. “Yes, niece?”

“Derek wants to crochet.”

Loudest dying whale noises from the living room. 

“Derek wants to _what_?”

“I know, right? It’s like knitting, only different. The girls at school do it.”

Uncle Peter takes a moment to parse this. Then he nods, reaches into his desk and pulls out a Mars bar, passing it over with gravity. “Thank you for this information,” he tells her.

She slips off the chair, candy hidden in her jeans pocket. “Pleasure doing business with you,” she answers, because she heard it in a movie once. 

He laughs.

+

Stiles is _amazing_. 

He makes Derek talk and he laughs at Cora instead of calling her annoying and he makes Uncle Peter smile. And then, the very next time she sees him, he gives her a flower and talks to her about craters and grief and the Dead Parent Club and he doesn’t do it like the counsellor at school does, or the therapist she went to exactly twice. He talks to her like she’s a grown-up, like she can understand what he says. 

But not in that way where he uses big words and ignores that she’s _ten_, but, nicely. He just talks and lets her make of that what she will and what Laura makes of it is – 

Well. It’s nice. It gives her hope that maybe, one day, it’ll be better. 

And then he gives her that cross stitching kit and incev – incen – motivation to finish it. 

Which is pretty cool, too. 

“Right, so,” she tells Derek one night, “we’re keeping Stiles, right?”

And Derek murmurs quietly, but fervently, “Yes, _please_,” because he’s been doing that, lately. With yarn wound around his fingers, he’s almost something like her chatterbox dork of a brother again. 

+

The cross stitch kit is – a thing. 

A craft thing. A hobby. Laura stares at it, sitting in the middle of her bedspread, and thinks of mom and the new-hobby-embargo. The six months are over. Mom’s not there to lift it. 

And Laura feels like a bad girl for touching the kit without mom’s permission, only mom can’t give her permission, because mom is – 

And here Laura is, wanting to try another new hobby, like nothing’s wrong, like nothing’s changed, when everything has and – 

“How’s your yarn thing going?” Uncle Peter asks, over breakfast. Eggs and bacon, not cereal. He’s starting to figure things out. And he drinks less, too. Laura likes that. 

“Great,” she chirps, makes a mental note to hide the unopened box somewhere and then distracts him with talk about weremaid astronauts. 

+

Derek makes a scarf for her.

It’s big and lumpy and he spends weeks on it, concentrating on each stitch, his tongue poking up between his teeth, doing his absolute best until it’s a thing with a shape and a function, until it’s a real thing _that he made_, a thing that _made him a little like Derek again_ and then he _gives it to her_. 

+

An hour after her bedtime, scarf wrapped around her waist like a belt, over her PJs, Laura sits cross-legged on her bed and opens the kit. 

There’s a little wooden ring with a screw, and some strange white fabric with a sketch on it and a lot of string and a needle. She gets up, fetches her scissors from her school bag. 

Then she lines up everything neatly and unfolds the little booklet with instructions. 

She threads the needle and fits the fabric into the ring, although she can’t quite manage to make it lie flat.

Whatever. 

Good enough. 

She grabs the ring and the needle and hesitates. Mom said – 

Flowers, she reminds herself. One day, there’ll be flowers in the crater, but Laura needs to plant them. She needs to make happy memories to fill it. 

She needs to – 

Carefully, she places the first stitch. 

She doesn’t stop until the sun peeks through the curtains. Her fingers ache, from the unpracticed movements as much as from all the times she pricked herself, and the dragonfly is crooked and the fabric is bunched up in places and she thinks she _hates_ cross stitching, but it’s finished. 

_Look, Mom,_ she thinks, _I made a flower_.

She sneaks it into Derek’s Batman yarn backpack later that day and never asks about it again.

+

After that, Laura is back to her regular hobby schedule. Except that, maybe, the flavor of the hobbies changes a little. It’s more arts and crafts now than sports, because, let’s be honest, Stiles. 

Stiles changes a whole lot of things about the Hale family, just by existing, really. 

She tries crochet (because Derek is a tiny, eyebrow-y menace) and knitting (Paige) and drawing (Erica) and wood carving (Boyd) and paper crafts (Stiles) and then tries it all over again and it’s fun, but it doesn’t seem right. 

The year she’s twelve, Uncle Peter gives her a super pretty, very grown-up leather bound-journal for Christmas. “So you can document all your projects in. I’m informed that every serious crafter needs one.”

Derek gets pretty much the same thing, only his is paper bound, and there are yarn balls on the front because, yeah, Derek’s pretty much locked himself in as the Crochet Guy, just like Stiles is the Yarn Guy. 

And because lettering is her latest thing, Laura spends the rest of Christmas break making super pretty entries for every craft she’s tried in the past couple of years and the projects she made with them. 

Stiles even helps her print pictures they took of her masterpieces. It looks like a really cool scrapbook and makes her seem way more artistic than it is. 

Once it’s done, just after New Year’s, she and Stiles snuggle up in the craft room and look through it, hot chocolate in hand, because that’s their thing and always will be. 

“So, have you found the right one, yet?” Stiles understands how important Hobby Finding is and takes it serious when no-one else in the family does. Which is dumb, because Derek has his and Cora is too young and Peter doesn’t _have_ a hobby, besides being a ‘smarmy, DILF douche’, whatever that means, Lydia.

She wrinkles her nose, thinks about it. Lettering is fun, but she knows herself well enough by now to recognize that she’s already losing interest again. This project was kind of all the outlet she needed for that particular hobby. 

Eventually, she shakes her head, feeling a little bad. She’s tried pretty much every hobby of everyone in her family and found them all boring. 

Not – not boring-boring, but not enough to hold her interest long enough. She tells Stiles so because if anyone can makes heads or tails of confused craft ramblings, it’s him. 

(And Derek, because Derek not-so-secretly wants to grow up to be Stiles.)

Stiles hums and then offers, “Well, most craft hobbies get harder with time. Like knitting and crochet, for example. You do it long enough, you can do some pretty fancy, complicated stuff that keeps your focus better than simple stuff does.”

“Like the grandma thing Derek’s doing now?”

Derek has recently discovered doilies. Laura thinks they’re ugly as sin, but Derek is grimly determined to figure out how they’re made, and then make them. She figures he’ll either give them to Grandpa, because he’s old, or to Alli, because she likes the shabby-chic thing. Laura hopes he gives them to Alli. Lydia is going to freak out if Alli actually, like, makes a scarf out of them, or something. It’ll be awesome. 

“Like, hold on a sec.” 

Stiles fishes his tablet out from under a stack of knitting magazines and turns it on. Five minutes later they’re hip-deep in Pinterest. 

“See this? And this? That’s some pretty amazing stuff, isn’t it?” 

Laura studies the delicate lacework presented to her. Shrugs. “It’s pretty, but….”

“But meh?” he finishes. 

She nods. “I want something that’s… harder? Like, something I really have to work for? And it has to be special. And pretty. And…..”

She huffs, slaps her scrapbook closed. 

Hobbies are _hard_. 

Stiles gives her a gentle noogie, then pulls her into his side. “We’ll find you something to do before you become President, promise.”

+

When she’s fifteen and being subjected to yet another Derek-monologue about Awesome Crochet Projects, she finds it. 

It’s a little picture on some random craft blog Derek has pulled up on his phone, and it’s – it’s perfect. 

“What’s that?” she blurts, interrupting Dorkek mid-word. 

“What’s what?” he snaps. His voice is starting to break and he squeaks and blushes and scowls and really, it makes riling him up that much more fun. 

Laura points. 

Little brother squints. 

She yanks the phone out of his hand and finds out for herself. 

Two hours later, she marches into _Yarnsome_ with Cora on one hand and her own phone in the other. 

“This,” she tells her parental unit, brandishing her phone. “I want this. What do I need?”

“Papa,” Cora whines, yanking herself free and lunging for Stiles’ waist. He catches her with long practice before she slams into his crotch. “Laura’s gone crazy!” she tells him in a loud whisper. 

He laughs, then pats her on the head and sends her toward the play corner. “I’ll deal with her, Rocket Girl. I hid a new toy in the box. If you find it on the first try, you get to pick dinner on Friday.”

And Cora’s off like a shot. Laura waggles her phone in Stiles’ face. He jerks back a little, fishes his glasses out of his ridiculous hair and peers at it, squinting. Why all her friends think Stiles is hot, she’ll never know. He’s like… Derek in adult size. Super dorky and fun and clever, but also, gross. 

He mhms. He haws. He shrugs. “You know this is super complicated, super fiddly and extremely slow, right? Like, we’re talking throw-shit-at-the-wall slow and fiddly.”

She shoves the phone into his face again, for emphasis. 

“Okay. Sheesh. Who raised you to be so demanding? Follow me.”

+

Her first try takes her three days and turns out shit because she miscounted. 

She’s more careful on her second try and it still turns out shit because her tension is all over the place. 

Then she has to cut up attempts one and two because she’s out of beads and starts over again. 

Two weeks after she marched into _Yarnsome_ she holds a finished bead rope necklace in delicate shades of pink and lavender in her hands. Some of the seed beads are crooked and in some places, she can see the yarn shining through, but she can also see the flower pattern worked with the beads and the satisfaction she feels at having made something to complex and beautiful is – it’s amazing. 

“I think,” she tells Derek when she makes him admire her creation, “that I get why you’re so into your crochet shit, now.”

“Uncle Peter! Laura said shit!!” Derek yowls. 

“So did you!” Uncle Peter hollers back from the kitchen. 

Laura elbows him. Derek elbows back. She sits on him. Then, peering down at him between her legs, she says, “You can make a frilly little bag for it.”

He hisses and spits. 

Two weeks after that, a frilly doily with a ribbon to pull it closed shows up on her bed. 

Two weeks after that, she gets Uncle Peter to drive them to Beacon Hills for the weekend. 

Derek comes to the cemetery with her. Cora stays with Grandpa. 

They place the flower necklace in the doily pouch and put both in pride-of-place at the foot of their parents’ tombstone. 

Derek stares at it sulkily for a while, the way he always does, before giving her a brief hug and wandering off to visit Grandma Stilinski. Seeing her doesn’t hurt nearly as much because none of them ever met her. She’s just a fond story Stiles tells them. It helps to have her, when they come here. 

Laura, alone, kneels down and tells her mom, very quietly, “I think you can lift the embargo, now. I think I’ve found something.”

+

When Laura is thirty-two, Cora fucks up the family betting pool by announcing that she’s getting married to Dani. 

Laura, who has fifty bucks riding on Derek and Paige getting hitched first, with the sub-clause of Paige asking Derek, not the other way around, is frustrated. 

They announce it at Cora’s birthday bash and before the last guests are gone, Stiles sidles up to Laura with his tablet in hand. “Collab?” he asks. 

“Collab,” she agrees. “Veil and jewelry?”

“Yap.”

Because they both know Derek has dibs on designing the dress and Paige on the music and Peter on the catering and Lydia on the flowers and general organization.

For the next three months, Laura spends most of her lunch breaks in her office, stringing beads, twisting wires and making ropes. 

Some of her colleagues laugh at the picture she makes, sitting behind her expensive desk in her glass-and-steel office, in a thousand dollar power suit, fighting with little glass beads and wire and yarn, but they all shut up when things start to take shape. 

“Holy crap, this is beautiful,” one of the associates says, trailing a hand over the comb Laura finished yesterday. 

She knows it clashes with the image she’s cultivated at work, the one where she’s a stone cold bitch and every inch Senior Partner Hale’s niece, but she smiles anyway. “Thank you.”

(He ends up being her date to the wedding and his expression, when he figures out Peter’s a complete and utter sap, is hilarious. It always is. Amy, well-versed in the phenomenon, makes sure to take pictures.)

Cora gets married in a dress designed by Derek, as predicted. 

Her veil is the most fragile and delicate thing Stiles has ever knit, so thin it looks like something halfway between dream catcher and spider web. It’s edged with tiny, glittering glass beads.

They match the hair vines, combs and jewelry Laura made for both brides. The hair accessories are simple, silver and white beads on silver wire, but for Dani’s earrings and Cora’s necklace, she pulled out all the stops. 

Silver and white and crystal, tinier beads than she’s ever worked with before and so, so delicate.

They are the most beautiful thing Laura has ever made and as she hands them over, each in their matching pouches, she thinks of drawing birds with her mother on the back porch, of that ugly, misshapen cross stitch dragonfly Derek still keeps on his bookshelf, of snuggling with Stiles as they contemplate crafts for her, of finishing her first necklace. 

She thinks of all those things as Cora launches herself at her for a hug and Dani joins in. 

She hugs them back tightly, both her baby sisters, closes her eyes and lets the flowers bloom. 

+

**Author's Note:**

> ETA: For those of you who keep asking what Laura's craft is - since I never explicitly state it in the story: It's bead rope crochet. If you feed that into Pinterest, you get about a million gorgeous results. It's a lovely, delicate craft and I make a necklace or two a year but no more, because one comes to about 20 work hours for me and a single wrong bead among thousands can ruin your entire project, no fixing possible. It's requires a lot of focus and is definitely not a TV craft. I love the results it produces, though. 
> 
> If you want a visual aid for the hair pieces she makes, try looking up bead hair vines, also on Pinterest. Less fiddly, just as gorgeous. 
> 
> /craft porn


End file.
